It’s funny how things turn out
AS YOU MIGHT imagine, humor doesn’t really interest me. Life shouldn’t be wasted on frivolous things. Laughter is the opiate of the underclass, something to soothe them till they can get what they really want in life, like plasma TVs or that crazy-good apple breakfast sausage from Whole Foods.
“Quit that laughing,” I’m always scolding the kids.
Doesn’t do any good. Sometimes when I order them not to laugh, they laugh even harder, gasping for air, choking on guffaws that reach all the way to their clammy little toes.
“Especially you!” I tell the toddler.
“Me?” he says, and the laughter spills from his eyes.
The thing is, I see great promise in the toddler, a chance at a serious life, a life of consequence. I’d hate to see an entire generation lost to laughter and mirth, small joys and giggles.
“Trust me, there’s no future in laughter,” I tell the toddler.
Of course he just laughs.
Even as 3-year-olds go, he’s a calamity. The other day, he slipped between the mattress and the headboard. Skinny as a love note, he often finds himself wedged in difficult places for which he hadn’t planned.
“Help!” he cried. “Help!!!” and three women came running.
When he was rescued, he asked his mother to kiss his boo-boo. His boo-boo being, of course, on his butt.
“I don’t kiss butts,” his mother explained.
“My head,” he says, patting his rump.
“I don’t kiss them either,” she says.
So, despite my high hopes, the early evidence is that the toddler could become one of those annoying blokes who find trouble everywhere, then make jokes of it. For instance, he’ll sit for hours, telling off-color stories to the goldfish that he and his sister brought home from the carnival.
I remember when I first saw the goldfish. I thought, “Great, we’re raising our own sushi.” Because if ever a house needed a break on sushi, it’s ours. The kids will demolish a California roll in about seven seconds. A lobster roll, five seconds. If the Japanese saw the way our kids devour sushi, they’d start bombing again.
Turns out, the goldfish is a pet.
“We don’t need any more pets,” I tell my wife.
“They won him at the carnival,” she explains.
I guess that would be “won” in the pejorative sense of the word. A store-bought goldfish will live about three hours. A goldfish you win at the carnival will live a minimum of 20 years. Our friends Chris and Debbie have had one for eight years. It’s now about 9 feet long and lives in their bathtub. They feed it corn dogs.
“Look, he’s talking to the fish again,” says the little girl, as the toddler zeroes in on the goldfish bowl.
“He thinks they’re brothers,” explains her big sister.
“That’s so sweet!” squeals the little girl.
Sure enough, they are both golden, in a mythic, Robert Redford sort of way. The fish seems to sleep during the day and swim around all night, another California trait. I’m surprised he didn’t come with a surfboard and a small family trust.
In any case, the toddler is sitting in front of the goldfish, dropping pieces of his onion bagel into the little bowl while discussing last night’s Dodger game. Poor fish.
“What’s he saying to the fish?”
“Something about Chad Lowe’s pitching,” says my wife.
“Derek Lowe?”
“Whatever,” she says.
Our own conversations -- the toddler and mine -- involve an almost reverse logic. To hear us, you’d think we were married and that one of us had been drinking.
“You gonna eat that?” I ask.
“Hi, Daddy!”
“Eat your dinner, OK?”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Silly Daddy,” he says.
At night, before bed, I’ll read to him. He likes almost any kind of literature as long as the protagonist is a truck.
He seems drunkenly happy when I read him books about trucks, his little head on my shoulder, all talcum powdered up after his evening bath. He looks like something you’d bake.
Every page or two, he stops me with a question. As in:
Me: “That? That’s a rainbow.”
Him: “Why?”
Me: “It’s what happens when the sun hits the rain.”
Him: “Why?”
Pause.
Me: “Who are you again?”
Him: “Why?”
Me: “And how’d you get in here?”
Him: “Why?”
I explain to him that some people see the world the way it is and ask “why.” Others see the world the way it could be and ask “why not?”
“Why?” he asks.
“I guess that would make you the first kind,” I say.
“Silly Daddy,” he says.
Yeah, like I’m the silly one.
Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.
